


Analysis and Conclusions

by letstalkabouttrek



Category: Iron Man - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Incredible Hulk - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bruce Banner Has Issues, Developing Relationship, M/M, Tony Stark Has Issues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-29
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-11 22:49:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4455473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/letstalkabouttrek/pseuds/letstalkabouttrek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Robert Bruce Banner died a month before his nineteenth birthday. His body was never recovered.</p>
<p>Six months later, David Brown took a job as a night janitor at Desert State University.<br/>---<br/>Anthony Edward Stark finished his first master’s degree a month before his nineteenth birthday. Stark Industries was testing a new line of weapons in New Mexico, and Stane thought it would be great for him to go and be involved.</p>
<p>To sweeten the deal, Desert State University was generously offering him use of their lab space.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

Robert Bruce Banner died a month before his nineteenth birthday, the tragic victim of a lab explosion. 

Culver University’s official statement would say that what occurred was an unfortunate accident, the unpredictable convergence of unlikely events that caused an experimental piece of equipment to malfunction, releasing a concerning about of radiation and setting the building aflame. In the resulting chaos of the evacuation, no one realized that an undergraduate research assistant had been in the chamber and hadn’t come out. But once the dust had settled, only two people were left unaccounted for.

Betty Ross was found on the side of a trail in the woods several hundred feet behind the facility, unconscious and severely injured. When she woke several days later, she had no memory of the accident or how she had escaped. 

Bruce Banner was considered missing until recovered security footage placed him in the chamber at the time of the explosion, at which point it was assumed by all parties that he was killed instantly. His body was never recovered from the contaminated rubble. 

The university held a memorial service, only to discover that the only thing that could be agreed upon was that Banner was as antisocial as he was brilliant. Friends of Betty Ross, who herself seemed to be Banner’s sole friend, reached to find words to describe him besides “quiet”, with the occasional “nice enough, I guess” thrown in for good measure. A headstone was placed atop an empty grave in a quiet cemetery on the outskirts of Dayton, but there was no funeral – the only person who visited was the aunt who had raised him. Tears were shed, condolences both empty and not were given, eyes were dried, and the world went on as if Bruce Banner had never existed.

Six months later, David Brown took a job as a night janitor at Desert State University.

**\---**

Anthony Edward Stark finished his first master’s degree a month before his nineteenth birthday, the primary subject of MIT gossip. 

He threw a massive party to celebrate, full of alcohol he couldn’t legally drink and so-called friends whose deepest descriptions of their host ranged from “cool” to “awesome”. Despite the best efforts of James “Rhodey” Rhodes, whose affectionate nickname betrayed his status as Tony Stark’s only _actual_ friend, the prodigy’s alcohol consumption rapidly reached the point where he would no longer be remembering what he was doing the following morning. A few days later, people would still be talking about the party, claiming that half of Cambridge must have been in attendance.

Maria Stark was not in Cambridge. She was across the country at a charity gala in LA, though she wrote an email to her son, telling him how proud she was of him and how sorry she was that she couldn’t be there. At least half of it was true.

Howard Stark was also not in Cambridge. He was in Japan on business, and told his assistant between meetings to send “something nice” to his son. Two hours later he took the time to put his signature on a card in between contracts. 

The next day, Obadiah Stane showed up at Tony’s apartment with a hangover cure and a proposition. Stark Industries was testing a new line of weapons – ones that Tony himself had helped design – in New Mexico, and Stane thought it would be great for the company’s heir and upcoming R&D star to go and be involved in the process. He would be able to see his work in action and make any improvements he thought of on-site, not to mention show the Board (and his father) that he was responsible when it came to company business.

It was the exact kind of thing Tony hated, so to sweeten the deal Stane mentioned that Desert State University was generously offering him use of their lab space.


	2. June 4th - Bruce

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A day in the life of David Brown.

Bruce woke to the atonal blaring of his alarm, which unsympathetically droned on as he fumbled to find the right button to silence it. Like every morning – though for him “morning” was two o’clock in the afternoon – he fought the urge to throw the damn thing against the wall and see whether its cheap plastic was stronger than the ancient drywall. 

Kicking off his sheets, Bruce took the two steps between the bed and the bathroom with his eyes still partially closed. He’d never been much of a morning person, and the nocturnal bent his schedule had taken definitely didn’t help on that front. The pipes groaned as he turned the faucet, and it took a few seconds before the spigot sputtered to life, blasting out water that Bruce was mostly sure was clean (though he wasn’t going to tempt fate by testing it). He wasn’t surprised to find that the water was disgustingly lukewarm; decent temperature regulation was one of the things one expected to give up when their primary requirements for an apartment were “dirt cheap” and “doesn’t ask questions”, along with quiet neighbors, air that didn’t constantly reek of cigarette smoke, and not having to compete with cockroaches for floor space.

That didn’t stop him from wishing that his water was cold as he splashed in on his face in a vain attempt to become more awake. 

The mirror in front of him was filthy, but Bruce could still see his reflection through the haze of what was probably decades-old grime. He couldn’t quite remember what he had looked like six months ago, but he was certain it wasn’t anything like the face that stared back at him now. His skin was paler than he’d ever remembered it being, which only made the bags under his eyes, whose hollows had somehow taken on dimensions that not even all night study sessions had ever produced, more noticeable. Water droplets clung to his close-cropped hair and the itchy stubble he’d let grow out into some facsimile of a beard.

He looked older, and Bruce supposed that was kind of the point – as far as the rest of the world was concerned, David Brown was 24. 

If he didn’t look too long, he could almost ignore how much he was starting to look like his father.

That thought tore Bruce’s eyes away from the mirror, and as he went through the motions of his morning routine he avoided his own reflection as if it were Medusa. His apartment was sweltering in the summer heat – air conditioning that functioned more than fifty percent of the time being another thing given up – so he took his time dressing, hoping to catch a bit of non-existent breeze through the three inches he’d been able to open the window. 

Eventually he gave up on that endeavor, so after pulling on his ratty second-hand sneakers, grabbing his backpack, and making sure he had his flash drive, he slipped out the door and locked it behind him as if it meant something in this neighborhood. 

The streets weren’t particularly busy this time of day, even when Bruce reached the more affluent parts of town, but he easily blended into what little foot traffic there was. Not for the first time, he was exceedingly grateful for how exceptionally _average_ he looked – average height, average build, brown hair and eyes, and no distinguishing features. If you walked through any major city for five minutes you would pass at least a dozen men who fit that description, and Bruce was careful to stay just as unobtrusive as his appearance suggested. 

Being invisible was a skill he had mastered early on in life, and the hellhole that was high school and Betty’s futile attempts to get him to socialize had kept him in good practice. Applying that knowledge, he had become as generic and unmemorable as the pavement he was walking on. His clothes came from thrift shops and WalMart, but were clean and free of holes – not shabby enough to be suspicious, but not nice enough to be a target. He walked down the street at a pace that suggested he had somewhere to be, but wasn’t in any particular rush to be there, not quite slouching but not quite standing straight either. He didn’t make eye contact, didn’t smile, and didn’t speak unless spoken to. 

It seemed to be working; Bruce didn’t think there was a single person who even remembered his fake name. 

Still, interacting with other people was an unfortunate necessity, especially when it came to his need for the internet. There were six suitable places with free wifi within walking distance of his apartment, and he alternated between them randomly so there would be no discernable pattern to his visits, nothing that could be noticed or remembered. All of them were national chains, staffed primarily by bored students looking for spending money and overworked adults doing too much work for too little pay; local mom and pop places were more likely to remember faces and try and strike up conversation, and the last thing Bruce needed were more lies to keep track of. 

Today’s location was a McDonald’s close enough to the university that Bruce would probably be written off as a sleep-deprived grad student if anyone bothered to look at him for more than two seconds. The girl behind the counter was obviously trying and failing to surreptitiously use her phone, so he just stood a few feet from the counter and waited for her to look up. 

It took about fifteen seconds for her to glance his way, at which point her eyes widened comically. “Oh sir, I’m so sorry, how may I help you?” She was obviously flustered, and probably scared Bruce was going to yell at her or ask to speak to her supervisor. He tried his best to give what he hoped was a placating smile, but probably looked more like a grimace. It was awkward. 

Thankfully the silence was broken by the entrance of a pack of teenage boys, talking loudly over one another about what Bruce presumed was sports of some kind. Bruce quickly placed his order – a value cheeseburger that would undoubtedly taste like grease and salt and a soda to wash it down and replace it with artificial flavors and sugar – and slipped off to the side to let the poor, still startled cashier deal with the onslaught. 

He picked up his food and settled into a booth in the corner, next to an outlet and far away from the door. His laptop took a painful amount of time to start up – it was the cheapest one he could find and gave him as much frustration as it did function. Setting up his usual network of proxies took a few minutes, and after double and triple checking to make sure everything was working he felt comfortable enough to set to work.

There were five other fake identities he was shoring up, just in case he needed to move on again. The David Brown identity was his most thorough by far, and it had taken four months of work and several illegal acts to build, requiring him to create a decently backdated online presence, go through the channels to obtain fake documents, and even take a random temp job in order to get a reference. If Bruce was going to allow himself to hope for anything, he was going to hope that he could stay here for at least a few months. But he had very rapidly learned that he needed to be prepared for everything to go to shit.

As he went through Facebook and Twitter and other social media, coming up with fake posts and facts and relationships in order to create lives that he could slip into at a moment’s notice, he forced himself to ignore the nagging voice in the back of his mind telling him to give into temptation and look up someone from his old life. Bruce was confident that he could count the people who actually cared about him on one hand and still have fingers left over, but he still felt guilty about letting them think he was dead. In the month after the accident, he had checked Betty’s Facebook every time he found internet access, desperately trying to prove to himself that she was okay despite the cast on her leg and the fading remnants of bruises across her body. There were even a few times that he had considered trying to find a way to contact her, or Aunt Susan, or even Dr. Selvig, to let them know he was alive.

That particular temptation had decreased dramatically since he’d fled Colorado with nothing but the clothes on his back and the knowledge that the military was after the Other Guy. So far it seemed like no one had made the connection between Bruce Banner, purportedly dead college student, and the green monster that had been popping up in rumors and shaky cell phone footage throughout the country, and it needed to stay that way. Which meant that Bruce Banner needed to stay dead.

He would contact them once he found a cure. That had become a mantra for him in the past few months: _Once I find a cure._

_Once I find a cure I can finish my degrees._

_Once I find a cure I can do proper research._

_Once I find a cure I can visit Mom’s grave again._

_Once I find a cure I can finally kiss Betty._

Okay, maybe the last one wasn’t going to happen; Bruce had the feeling that whatever it was that he and Betty might have had, it wasn’t going to happen anymore. Whatever fleeting moment they had had to push past almost was likely blown away with everything else in the explosion. But the idea of it was nice. At the very least it was something to hold on to. 

And visiting his mom’s grave would be weird, seeing as his own was right next to it. Bruce idly wondered whether or not he could get himself legally un-declared dead without going to prison for the numerous illegal things he had done in the past months.

Those thoughts were pushed out of his mind when an email popped up on his screen. One of his fake identities had been inquiring about obtaining Canadian documents under the name of another of his fake identities, a project he had started immediately after Colorado. If he needed to leave the country, it would be best not to have to identify himself as an American.

Bruce forced himself to focus back on his work, losing himself in the network of back channels and black markets he’d come to know far too well. He noted to himself when the girl behind the counter left and was replaced – he tried to plan his outings near shift changes so it was less likely someone would notice how long he had been there – but let the rest of the world fade into the background as the dinner crowd started coming in. 

It was nearing six o’clock when Marcus Johnson became one step closer to a Canadian driver’s license and Bruce decided it was time to leave. He wasn’t due at work until ten, but he had data he needed to analyze - a task that thankfully didn’t require an internet connection.

The crowds on the street were significantly larger than they were when he’d arrived, and he joined the flow of pedestrians heading away from a nearby office building. Even with the sun descending towards the horizon, the New Mexico heat was stifling, especially after sitting in air conditioning for so long, and being in the middle of a moving mass of humanity didn’t help matters. Bruce distracted himself by attempting to estimate the amount of heat the crowd was generating until he broke away and headed towards his apartment building.

Walking up the steps to the third floor, he knew before he even passed the second that the couple next door to him was already home. They were arguing loudly in a language Bruce was fairly certain was Bengali, and from past experience he knew it would continue for at least an hour before they transitioned into stony silence, eventually coming around to even louder makeup sex. 

He hoped that they at least saved that part until after he left for work. 

It had only taken a week of living here for Bruce to decide that he needed to invest in earplugs, so he put them in to reduce the noise to a dull roar before he started working. His data was woefully incomplete, but there had to be something in it that would be useful. He was working practically blind, and despite reading everything he could get his hands on both legally and illegally about gamma radiation he still had no real starting point to work with. 

What little he had to work with was equally fascinating and disturbing. His metabolism was running faster than it used to; from carefully monitoring his caloric intake and weight he had determined he needed at least 1.4 times as many calories as he had previously. His average body temperature ran at about 100.2 degrees Fahrenheit. He healed faster than he had thought were even possible, cuts and bruises disappearing within a day. His blood appeared to be highly radioactive and toxic.

And of course there was the issue of turning big and green whenever he got worked up. 

Bruce knew very little about what he had termed “the Other Guy”, relying on wildly varying witness statements from conspiracy blogs and tabloid newspapers along with what was probably a grand total of thirty seconds of extremely shaky footage. There had been nine Incidents since the explosion at Culver, and his memories of them were limited to brief glimpses tinted by a fog of rage. From what he could piece together, whenever the Other Guy came out to play there was a trail of destruction left in his wake.

He hadn’t found reports of any deaths, but he couldn’t be sure.

His information was limited to the basics – somewhere between seven and eight feet tall, a shade of green straight out of a crayon box, more muscle mass than most bodybuilders aspire to, loud, angry, and possibly bulletproof. 

Time flew by as he considered possibility and created models, and when the drone of his alarm reminded him it was time to get ready for work, he was left with exactly what he’d had when he started – a lot of interesting ideas, but absolutely nothing concrete. What he needed was more data on his own biochemistry, and that had been slow going. 

Still, he saved what he had and backed it up to three different flash drives, most importantly, the one he wore on a steel cable around his neck. Bruce had lost all of his early work after he’d had an Incident in Ohio and woke up in Indiana, so he’d taken to carrying all of his data with him in a way that even the Other Guy wasn’t too likely to break. He only took it off to shower, keeping it safely tucked beneath his clothes the rest of the time. 

Once he was satisfied that his work was as safe as it could be, he set about getting ready for work. His navy janitorial uniform was at least two sizes too big and was horribly itchy, but it let him blend into the background even better than his normal clothes.

Bruce wound up getting to the university ten minutes early, but he got to work right away. His shift lasted from ten to six, and if he went at a good pace he could get all of his assigned work done in seven of those eight hours. So he kept an eye on the clock as he mopped floors and emptied trash cans, and when he got to the lab building at two he had finished seventy percent of what he had to do, giving him plenty of time to his unofficial work. 

He went about cleaning as normal, which didn’t take long; half the building was sitting unused during the summer, requiring only a perfunctory once over to remove accumulated dust. It only took a half hour for Bruce to reach his final destination, an out of the way bathroom at the far end of the vacant section of the second floor. 

Inside, it was a simple matter of standing on top of the toilet in the third stall, shifting aside a ceiling tile, and removing the laptop he had stored there his third night on the job. It took less than five minutes to get past the university’s firewall, gain access to the security system via a painfully obvious backdoor, and set the security camera footage for the entire hallway to loop indefinitely. 

The lab across the hall was normally used for various undergraduate science classes, and the odd mix of equipment it held was passable, but far from ideal. Bruce had spent his first two weeks trying to augment his workstation as much as possible, either by subtly pilfering things from other labs or sneaking in his own purchases, but he’d finally accepted that it was as good as it was going to get for the time being. 

Tonight was only his third night of being able to do actual lab work, and he had less than an hour to try and get some sort of usable data. But the universe seemed to be conspiring against him; the cell cultures that he had incubating were nowhere close to being ready. He had a small number of blood samples he had taken the previous night that he could potentially try and analyze, but with the equipment he had he wouldn’t get anything useful. Drawing his own blood was a thoroughly unpleasant experience, and he didn’t want to waste what he had collected now in case he figured out a way to access some of the more high tech labs.

Gazing at the four vials, which looked pathetic sitting in the middle of an otherwise empty fridge, he reluctantly admitted to himself that they probably wouldn’t be enough even if he did find a way to access the equipment he needed. 

Well, it wasn’t like he was going to have anything better to do tonight. Bruce took his medical supplies down from the cabinet he had stored them in and mentally prepared for the task ahead.

He had to use his teeth to tie the tourniquet, the chemical taste of rubber filling his mouth. The sharp, sterile smell of antiseptic wipes hit him as he prepped the inside of his elbow –

A low, rumbling growl suddenly filled his head, startling him out of his concentration. The wipe fell from his hand, drifting uselessly to the floor as Bruce tried to force down the rising surge of green in his mind, taking deep, measured breaths.

For a few long moments, he sat their breathing – _in through the nose, out through the mouth, in through the nose, out through the mouth_ \- until he finally felt silence settle over his brain.

Bruce made a mental note – the Other Guy was not fond of medical procedures. 

Once his hands had stopped shaking, he went through the rest of the procedure. He grit his teeth as he watched the toxic sludge that flowed through his veins slide through the clear plastic tubing and into vial after vial, looking so much like ordinary blood that he could almost fool himself into thinking that it was. 

Bruce forced his way through ten vials, stopping when the Other Guy threatened to make himself known again. He quickly labeled them, stored them in the fridge, and cleaned up the lab space, making sure to collect every scrap of trash he had created by playing doctor. When he stepped out the door, the lab once again looked unused. 

Back in the safety of the bathroom, he allowed himself a moment to rest, splashing blessedly cool water on his face as he leaned against the sink. What had happened hadn’t been a close call – it was far from it, in comparison to some of the other near-Incidents he’d had over the months – but any time his other half reared his head was draining. He reveled in the absolute stillness of the building, himself the only person inside, the only sounds the hum of electricity and the rise and fall of his own breathing.

His brief moment of peace couldn’t last, however; he had a job to do. Taking the laptop back down, he gave himself five minutes to exit the lab building before the cameras stopped looping – no need to be seen leaving and create questions as to what a janitor was doing in the bathroom for an entire hour. His limbs felt leaden as he went through the rest of his shift on autopilot, mopping identical floors and cleaning identical windows throughout campus.

The unexpected lethargy cost him time, and it was nearing seven by the time he finally boarded the bus that would take him back to his apartment. He used the last dregs of his energy to eat one of the disgusting high-calorie protein bars he used to feed his metabolism, take a shower that alternated between freezing cold and vaguely warm, and collapse into bed.

He’d made it through another day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I originally thought this chapter would be split between Bruce and Tony, but as I am a sucker for Bruce and his clever fugitive ways it got somewhat out of hand. The next chapter will be Tony's perspective of the same day to compensate, and it will become more clear what the actual plot of the story is. 
> 
> At this point I have vague ideas for the next few chapters and I know what the climax will probably be. How we get from here to there is still not known.


	3. June 4th - Tony

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A day in the life of Tony Stark.

_Good morning, Sir. The time is currently nine AM. The temperature outside is seventy one degrees Fahrenheit. Mister Stane will be arriving in two hours._

_Good morning, Sir. The time is currently nine fifteen AM. The temperature outside is seventy one degrees Fahrenheit. Mister Stane will –_

_Good morning, Sir. The time is currently nine thirty AM. The temperature outside is seventy two deg –_

_Good morning, Sir. The time is currently nine forty –_

_Good morning, Sir. The –_

Tony groaned as he finally rolled out of bed, idly smashing JARVIS’s keyboard as he did so to turn off his alarm for the fifth time that morning. As proud as he was that his baby AI was starting to take on a life of his own, the levels of mother-henning JARVIS gave him were rapidly approaching that of his namesake. Despite the fact that he was still limited to a laptop – a custom laptop that Tony had built from scratch, at least three times as powerful as anything commercially available, but a laptop nonetheless – he always seemed to know when Tony was neglecting either his health or his responsibilities. 

He stumbled to the bathroom, knowing from experience that a long, hot shower was all he needed to clear up the not-quite-hangover fuzz in his head; he’d had a few drinks on the plane to New Mexico, sure, but that was absolutely tame by his standards. 

The shower in the condo Obie had found for him was absolutely perfect: big and spacious, with multiple shower heads, a handrail that would definitely prove invaluable after a long night of drinking, and a bench for when he had stayed up for longer than forty-eight hours and was dead on his feet. Like the rest of the house, the bathroom had been stocked with all of his preferred products before his arrival. As he stood under the hot spray, the slightly spicy scent of his shampoo floating in the steamy air, he realized he should probably thank Obie. It wasn’t like Tony was incapable of making his own arrangements – or, more accurately, paying someone to make his arrangements – but it was a drain on time he could spend doing better things.

It took nearly half an hour for Tony to finish showering, shave (because no matter what he did the goatee of his dreams still wasn’t happening), and fix his hair into just the right combination of style and bedhead to communicate all the fucks he did not give. 

While he was dressing, JARVIS oh so helpfully informed him that he only had half an hour until Obie showed up. Which, unfortunately, was probably not enough time to both order and eat breakfast, especially when he hadn’t ordered from a restaurant before and built up a reputation of large tips that got him priority service. 

He had to look a bit to find the kitchen, since he hadn’t exactly bothered to take a tour when he had arrived exhausted and slightly inebriated at ten o’clock last night, but it was just as well stocked as the rest of the condo, cupboards and fridge filled with foods that he wasn’t exactly sure how whatever service Obie had hired knew were his favorites. 

He decided on a box of apple Toaster Strudel from the fridge, stuffing four of them into the shiny, high-end toaster and very maturely resisting the urge to eat the frosting packets while he waited. 

Maturity. That was certainly a thing he’d been hearing a lot about lately. He remembered Obie’s words when he proposed this whole arrangement: _Now your father wasn’t sure, didn’t think you’re mature enough to really supervise a major operation, but I told him I you were up to the task._ And yeah, he knew on some level that Obie was manipulating him, relying on the familiar tension between father and son to get Tony to take the job, but he really didn’t care.

Because damn if it didn’t sound like exactly the kind of thing Howard would say.

And if he’d spent the month between then and know partying his way through Western Europe, picking up men and women in seven different countries through a combination of his charm, intellect, wealth, and language skills… well, it wasn’t like dear old dad actually gave him enough thought to keep up with his exploits. 

The sudden pop of the toaster startled Tony out of his thoughts, and he quickly removed the piping hot pastries – which were perfectly toasted to a crisp golden brown – and put them on the waiting plate. He took his bounty over to the breakfast bar, covered them in the wonderful, pure processed sugar that was Toaster Strudel icing, and devoured them in under five minutes.

Huh. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until he’d had food in front of him. But it seemed like now that he’d taken care of that primal urge, his body was ready to pester him about another – caffeine.

Because Obie knew him so well, the kitchen was stocked with two different coffee makers – a tried-and-true coffee pot that could fit enough to fuel a small army, and a fancy single-cup brewer. Tony opted for the latter, since he wouldn’t be sticking around long enough to be drinking much more.

Once he had a full mug of hazelnut-flavored goodness, he considered his options. He still had a good fifteen minutes to go until Obie showed up, so he got his laptop and started glancing over the project itinerary he’d received three days ago but just hadn’t gotten around to. He felt a flash of annoyance at Obie when he saw that the actual testing wasn’t going to start for another three weeks – why the hell did _he_ have to be here for all the boring pre-explosion work?

Maybe this whole maturity thing was a bit overrated.

At least he’d have a lab, even if it was located at some second-tier university no one worth talking about had ever even heard of. If he decided to blow off safety drill or “synergistic goal-setting meeting” – whatever that was – he could retreat into the work he was actually good at with his robot and AI for company; DUM-E was set to arrive tomorrow, and he already had plans for setting up a wireless system of speakers, microphones, and cameras for JARVIS so he didn’t have to stay within ten feet of his laptop all the time. 

That train of thought completely distracting him from the itinerary, Tony minimized it and pulled up the floor plans of his temporary workshop, trying to figure out the best arrangement. Technically, he also had full access to the chemistry and biology lab next door, which was connected to the shop by a shared storage closet, but unless he got bored and felt the need for a minor chemical explosion, he probably wouldn’t be using it – no need to give JARVIS any more than a camera or two to keep an eye on things.

He was still immersed in his plans when he heard the door open; Obie had a spare key and had learned years ago not to bother with knocking, since Tony wouldn’t bother to answer half the time. 

“Ready to head to work, my boy?” Calling Tony “my boy” was one of the things Obie and _only_ Obie was allowed to get away with, merely because he had been doing it for as long as Tony could remember. 

“Yeah, give me a second.” Tony downed the last dregs of his coffee and put his dishes in the sink – the housekeeping service would be around eventually to take care of them, but he could at least pretend he was being cleanly. After he saved his plans for the workshop and put his laptop back in his bag, he headed to meet Obie. 

“It’s good to see you, Tony,” Obie said, cuffing Tony on the shoulder in a half-embrace as he led him out the door. “I’m glad you decided to take this opportunity. I remember what it’s like to be young, sowing your wild oats, but you have gifts, my boy. They shouldn’t go to waste.”

Their conversation continued on a similar vein as their got into the sleek black company car, Obie giving him the rundown of the day’s plans in between asking questions about Tony’s time in Europe. Tony actually remembered to thank him for making the arrangements for the condo, and when Obie said it was no big deal he actually sounded like he meant it. 

Tony wasn’t sure at what point in his upbringing Obie had realized that Howard wasn’t the most present father and decided to step in to fill the gap, but he wasn’t going to complain.

It didn’t take long to reach the Stark Industries office-slash-research facility on the edge of the city, and a flash of Obie’s ID and the statement “I’m Tony Stark” got them through security in record time. Of course, “record time” was still a few minutes; this was one of the company’s smaller facilities – probably because no one wanted to move to fucking New Mexico – but thanks to the nature of their work, it was one of the best-secured. 

After Obie gave him a basic tour of the building – here are the offices, here are the conference rooms where we talk about boring shit, there’s the elevator, the restrooms, the cafeteria, the security desk, and everything else Tony could not find it in him to care about – they headed to where Tony would be spending most of his time, the labs. They were bustling with activity, likely the last push of productivity before lunchtime, given that it was just about noon, but some people still stopped to look at Tony with a mix of curious glances and glares.

It was pretty much par for the course in terms of his interactions with SI employees. Tony had been doing minor R&D work since before he even had his first bachelor’s, and he’d quickly figured out that there were two types – those who would suck up to him because of who his father was, and those who hated him because they assumed he was a rich brat who was only there because of who his father was. The former were annoying more than anything, especially because they seemed to be under the impression that Howard Stark actually listened to his son (or spoke to him more than once a month, for that matter). The latter, however, could be a lot of fun, especially when he redid their work to be ten times better.

Tony could tell just by looking that the head of the project team was firmly on the “hate” side of that particular fence. When Obie introduced them, Dr. Roberson – who very pointedly did _not_ invite Tony to call him Greg, even though he’d heard one of the other scientists refer to him as such – gave him a brief once over, pointed him towards an empty workstation, and stalked off muttering under his breath about not being paid to babysit. 

“You’ll show them,” Obie reassured him as he began arranging his things as his workstation (which just so happened to be tucked away in the emptiest corner of the room, surprise surprise), and once again Tony was glad that Obie was the one he had around in these situations. Instead of silently agreeing with the deriding assessment, like Howard would have done, or trying to intervene on his behalf, like Maria, he trusted Tony and his abilities enough to know that he could deal with whatever crap people threw at him.

And then Obie had to leave, off to do the meticulous business stuff that was so incredibly uninteresting compared to machines and wires and lines of code. If he had to take on more leadership roles in SI as he got older, he was hiring someone to do as much of that shit as possible for him so he could stay in his workshop and actually create the things that kept them in business.

Currently, the stuff that kept them in business was in dire need of work. Apparently the reason everyone in the lab was still frantically working, even though it was well into what should have been their lunch, was that they were having issues actually building the prototype weapons they had designed. Tony was confused about how that could even be an issue, until he took a look at the blueprints himself.

He had to stop himself from laughing; that would definitely not endear him to his new lab mates, and despite what his reputation suggested he actually preferred that the people he had to spend large amounts of time with not utterly despise him. But the designs really were that bad, confused and jumbled in places where conventional methods had been used and clearly didn’t work, with a total lack of creative vision and finesse. 

Some people thought making things that blew up was easy, but weapon design was an art. And what Tony was looking at now was the equivalent of the guy who did caricature drawings at the state fair – professional, certainly, and with a reasonable amount of skill, but not exactly Picasso. 

These missiles were supposed to be cutting edge, smaller, stronger, and tougher than anyone had ever thought they could be. They needed Picasso.

Thankfully, Tony could deliver.

Hell, he had already practically solved half of the problems already. He felt a mix of pride and anger at that; he had taken time to give input on these designs – time that had been taken away from his thesis and his seduction of that biomed major with the really amazing abs – and these people had ignored them, figuring they could do it better. And now they needed his help.

He decided to start on the circuitry for what was supposed to be the star weapon of the line, the Jericho Missile. It was an overcomplicated mess; one Tony was basically going to have to start from scratch to fix.

The work was engaging, and since he had already done it once already it flew by quickly as he plotted out wires and chips and power systems, sometimes recreating from memory and sometimes coming up with new improvements on the fly. He didn’t bother with the details; those were routine enough that anyone on the team could do them. Really, the issue with the whole design was that it was countless bits of detail work haphazardly patched together with no real cohesion, no focus on the big picture. And, at least when it came to engineering, the big picture was Tony’s specialty. 

Finishing the final touches on his preliminary blueprints, Tony realized it was nearly six o’clock, and his stomach was once again making itself known – it probably had been for several hours and he simply hadn’t noticed. Dinner was in order.

He uploaded his blueprints to the team network, subtly looking out of the corner of his eye to watch Dr. Roberson’s jaw drop when he opened them. Tony felt the heat of the man’s gaze on him as he nonchalantly gathered his things and left the lab, as if he hadn’t even noticed the reaction to his work.

Once he was safely in the hallway, however, all bets were off. He broke out into what he was sure was a ridiculous grin, but whatever, no one was here to see it. If he were the type to skip – and he was most definitely _not_ , he was Tony Stark and he _strutted_ \- he might have had a skip in his step as he left the building.

He called a company car – he had his own, of course, but it was arriving tomorrow with DUM-E – and burned rubber as he left the premises. His priorities, in order, were 1.) getting food, and 2.) seeing his lab.

Tony satisfied the food requirement by finding the nearest Chinese takeout and buying all his favorites, playfully flirting with the women behind the counter who must have been at least seventy, and leaving an extremely generous tip as he inquired into their delivery policies. His condo wasn’t in their delivery radius, but the university was; he was sure that if he built frequent customer loyalty he could get them to bend the rules for him and go an extra mile or two if he found himself craving lo mein at two in the morning.

The university campus was fairly sedate. There were a few handfuls of summer students, either going to evening classes or just milling about, but that was about it. DSU was on the edge of a city that wasn’t that big to begin with; it was completely different from the bustling streets of Cambridge and Boston that Tony was used to. 

Of course, there were advantages to the low population density – chiefly, parking. Tony grabbed a spot that was right next to the lab building, gathered up his MSG-laden, pseudo-Asian deliciousness, and headed inside. 

It wasn’t a particularly large or impressive building, but at the very least everything was very clearly labeled. He found his lab easily, at the end of an empty hallway on the second floor. Obie had apparently told the university that Tony highly valued his privacy; a statement that was not untrue, at least when it came to his work. So the lab they had given him was in a temporarily vacant section of the building, its labs sitting unused under the relatively light demands of the summer semester. 

The lab itself… well, it was decent. Like the building, it wasn’t exactly impressive, but it was actually slightly better than Tony had expected. He might have to jury rig a few pieces of equipment, but as far as he was concerned that was half the fun – even when he had access to state-of-the-art labs at MIT he’d made his own shit half the time just because he could. 

He idly munched on egg rolls as he walked around, the general trend of pleasant surprises continuing until he looked for a fridge – because, no doubt, eventually he _would_ forget to eat, and he figured having some leftover Chinese around was as good as anything for snacking emergencies – and couldn’t find one. 

And seriously? What kind of lab didn’t have at least a mini fridge? Science and engineering binges were precious, delicate things that couldn’t be interrupted by such simple tasks as having to acquire food.

Tony checked the storage closet, and once again came up empty handed. But as he was moving to leave, he caught a glimpse of the other lab in the corner of his eye.

Specifically, of the small sample fridge sitting in the corner. Jackpot.

Yeah, he’d heard the _you can’t put food in the sample fridge, Tony, it’s unhygienic_ speech about a million times in college, but he figured this didn’t count since there wouldn’t be any actual samples in said fridge. He went back into his lab to grab the carton of noodles he intended on saving and then headed next door, intending to assess how much he would be able to fit in the –

There was blood. 

Tony blinked a few times, looked again, and there was still blood. Four vials of it, to be precise, all neatly labeled with a string of letters and numbers, just sitting in the middle of the fridge as if there was supposed to be strange blood in the fridges of empty labs on quiet desert college campuses. 

As far as he concerned, there were two options. Option one, vampires – though why any vampire would choose to settle in New Mexico he had no idea, maybe it kept the element of surprise? – and option two, rogue science. And despite his long-lasting love of Buffy, Tony wasn’t ready to consider option one yet. So rogue science it was.

It was an easy enough hypothesis to prove or disprove, he just had to look for other signs of illicit experimentation going on. And sure enough, there was _something_ growing in the incubator (and don’t judge, Tony had never been much of a biology guy – living things were just so messy when compared to the elegant beauty of machines) and a small stash of medical equipment, including materials for drawing blood, hidden in the back corner of a cabinet. 

Tony supposed that this was the point where a mature, responsible person would tell someone in authority that there was unauthorized, probably-human-related science going on in their labs. But he’d used up his maturity quota much earlier in the day, and he always trusted his gut.

And right now his gut was telling him that he should investigate.

The security footage of the hallway was as good enough a place to start as any, and it only took Tony two minutes to hack into the university’s servers and retrieve it. (The backdoor was painfully obvious, maybe he should offer to fix it for them when this is all said and done.) But, he realized as he quickly fast-forwarded through the past few days, it didn’t seem to show anything, just an empty hall and empty labs, with the occasional janitor coming through with a mop and – 

Wait. Tony paused the footage he was watching from last night and rewound it, looking carefully. Sure enough, at two in the morning a janitor entered the bathroom and never came out. Even closer inspection of other footage set at the same time reveals oh-so-small changes – clocks suddenly shifting to different times, lights turning on or off, papers moved just a few inches from where they were.

The footage had been looped. 

Now that he had a place to start, it was easy to find what he was looking for. There were ten separate nights, all in the past three weeks, where, at some point between two and three in the morning, the footage started looping. The same ten minutes of eerily empty building, over and over until the live feed resumed anywhere from thirty to sixty minutes later. And every incident of looped footage started within five minutes of the same janitor entering the bathroom. 

A quick look in the university’s personnel records revealed said janitor to be David Brown. A slightly-less-quick google search – and perhaps a foray or two into databanks Tony _technically_ wasn’t supposed to have access to – revealed said name to be fake. 

Tony was intrigued. He had figured the rogue scientist would be some desperate university student whose thesis got rejected, or a disgruntled lab assistant who wanted to prove their crackpot pet theory. He’d seen both before, at MIT and SI. But a night janitor with a fake identity whose only listed reference was a temp job as a drill press operator in Nebraska, of all places? That was new. That was interesting.

So now that he had his rogue scientist, he just had to figure out the rogue science. 

He went back to the security system with newly alighted fervor, and after a very thorough scouring of the code he found how Brown had been getting in. The setup the man had was clever; instead of having to insert the looped footage every time he got up to his nighttime activities, he’d created his own protocol that he could activate and deactivate.

But the protocol had the one flaw Tony had been looking for; when it sent the looped footage to the security office, it didn’t turn off the cameras whose footage was being replaced. Which meant that they were still recording, and the original footage should be somewhere in the depths of the system, ready to reveal whatever secrets Brown was trying to keep. Tony just needed to find it.

Thirty minutes later, he was forced to grudgingly admit temporary defeat. The footage was nowhere to be found, not even in the deepest, darkest corners of the security archives, and the only conclusion Tony could come to was that Brown had deleted the footage – and not the “this doesn’t show up on my files list but still exists in a junk folder somewhere” kind of deletion that most people seemed to think counted, but actual, honest-to-god, this-will-never-exist-again, banished-to-the-depths-of-electronic-purgatory deletion.

Whoever David Brown was, he was good. It was fascinating. 

Unfortunately for Brown, Tony still had one major weapon left in his arsenal – his superior coding skills. It was child’s play to set up his own protocol, to be activated by the activation of Brown’s protocol, that would immediately stream the live footage right to his laptop, not giving Brown any time to delete it. The next time he got up to his super-secret janitorial science adventures, which according to his file was tonight, Tony would have a front row seat.

Satisfied with his work, Tony grabbed his tragically-abandoned leftovers and headed out, throwing them in the lobby trashcan on his way to make sure there was absolutely no trace of his presence in Brown’s lab. 

When he got back to the condo, he was struck by another issue. He had absolutely nothing to do. The business with Brown had gotten him worked up, and he could feel the restless energy bubbling beneath his skin, waiting to be let out. But it was barely nine o’clock, meaning he had a minimum of five long, boring hours to get through before anything actually _happened_.

He supposed he could find out David Brown’s actual, non-fake identity, if he wanted. The photo from his DSU ID was relatively high-quality, and even if he’d changed his appearance facial recognition would probably turn up something. But that seemed wrong, on some level – like he was invading the privacy of the man he was going to secretly spy on.

And anyway, he fully intended to find out eventually. Just not now. 

So with that option out, Tony had to find some other way to distract himself. He browsed his personal project files, looking for something interesting enough to hold his attention for the rest of the night, and found a set of blueprints that had been untouched for months. They were for another robotic assistant, a new and improved best-friend-slash-little-brother he’d been meaning to build for DUM-E, before he got caught up in finishing his thesis and forgot. 

The plans were no more than vague outlines, so Tony let himself get lost in improving them. He was in the middle of trying to figure out if he could get the claw precise enough to be able to work appliances – because he seriously did not need a repeat of the DUM-E blender incident – when an alert popped up that his protocol had been activated. 

On the slightly-grainy security footage, Brown walked into the lab. Tony watched as he opened the incubator, checked the cultures, and closed it again, the look of annoyance on his face obvious even through the security camera. Brown just stood for a few moments, before walking over to the fridge and opening it, staring at the vials of blood Tony had found. The engineer hoped that this would be the moment he learned what said blood was actually _for_ , but Brown just closed the fridge again, shaking his head slightly.

Tony mumbled some half-hearted curses under his breath as Brown got down the medical supplies from their hiding spot in the cabinet. He’d been hoping to see some actual science, not the oh-so-exciting spectacle of drawing blood, though he supposed it confirmed what had been his suspicion all along – that the blood in the bridge was Brown’s. Tony watched him roll up the sleeve of his uniform, tie the tourniquet one-handed with what was obviously practiced skill, even if he did have to use his teeth as well, and swab his elbow with an antiseptic wipe.

And then Brown just sat there, completely still. Tony let out a laugh at that – the guy was risking his job and possibly jail time by doing unapproved science experiments on himself in the dead of night, but he was scared of needles. 

The whole statue act continued for a few more minutes, to the point where Tony actually checked to make sure Brown hadn’t been able to loop _that_ footage on him, however improbable that actually was. But no, the guy was just sitting there, trying to find his inner Zen or whatever so he could stick a few millimeters of metal into his arm. Brown eventually got around to the actual blood drawing part, taking enough vials that Tony eventually got bored and stopped counting them. Each vial was labeled and stuck in the fridge, and then Brown was gone.

When his protocol was deactivated eight minutes later, the security footage showed nothing but an empty building.

Tony needed a plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Somehow, Tony managed to inspire me to write an even longer chapter than Bruce did. But we finally have the ball rolling, and Bruce and Tony will meet properly in the next chapter.

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a random idea I had while on vacation, and while this summer has been kind of awful and I haven't written much I think if I at least put something up it will motivate me to actually do something.
> 
> A few notes on timelines and canons:  
> -I kept Bruce and Tony's birthdays at MCU canon, but shifted the year so the story proper starts in June 2015. So Bruce would be born on December 18th, 1995 and Tony on May 25th, 1996.  
> -Bruce's character will combine elements fro 616, the MCU, and the 70s/80s The Incredible Hulk TV show.  
> -Since portrayals of Hulk vary wildly in power level, this one will be somewhere stronger than the Bixby/Ferrigno Hulk but not as strong as the Ruffalo Hulk.
> 
> I have no idea where this is going, so I will add characters and tags as I figure it out.


End file.
